Meeting Abstract
Developing rigorous ecological models is a fundamental goal of ecologists to forecast biotic responses to climate change. Many models are amechanistic and lack integration of behavior, but behavioral plasticity is increasingly recognized as an important adaptive mechanism for species. We integrated biophysical and agent-based models to examine how climbing behavior could affect the sensitivity of Plethodontid salamander activity time to climate. We used a temperature differential to stimulate plant climbing, which reduced body temperatures and dehydration rates. The model showed climbing plants increased activity time in drier conditions, particularly for smaller salamanders. The predicted importance of climbing behavior was highly sensitive to assumptions about the threshold of water loss an individual was willing to tolerate. Because activity time is associated with fitness, increased activity time could moderate overall sensitivity to shifts in weather patterns. To test whether thermal gradients predicted plant climbing, we collected repeated count data on terrestrial salamanders in the southern Appalachian mountains across a range of microhabitats and weather conditions. The probability a salamander was observed climbing increased with greater soil temperature relative to air temperature, which was consistent with model predictions of plant climbing as a compensatory behavior to extend activity. Compensatory behaviors, like climbing, have the potential to moderate the effects of weather on salamander activity and fitness, which may dampen population sensitivity to climatic variation in rainfall or soil moisture. We used the field data to parameterize preliminary climate change models including climbing as a compensatory behavior.
